l agencies than that by which a man's
written intentions control the posthumous disposition of his goods.
Testaments very slowly and gradually gathered round them the qualities
I have mentioned; and they did this from causes and under pressure of
events which may be called casual, or which at any rate have no
interest for us at present, except so far as they have affected the
history of law.

At a time when legal theories were more abundant than at
present--theories which, it is true, were for the most part gratuitous
and premature enough, but which nevertheless rescued jurisprudence
from that worse and more ignoble condition, not unknown to ourselves,
in which nothing like a generalisation is aspired to, and law is
regarded as a mere empirical pursuit--it was the fashion to explain
the ready and apparently intuitive perception which we have of certain
qualities in a Will, by saying that they were natural to it, or, as
the phrase would run in full, attached to it by the Law of Nature.
Nobody, I imagine, would affect to maintain such a doctrine, when once
it was ascertained that all these characteristics had their origin
within historical memory; at the same time, vestiges of the theory of
which the doctrine is an offshoot, linger in forms of expression which
we all of us use and perhaps scarcely know how to dispense with. I may
illustrate this by mentioning a position common in the legal
literature of the seventeenth century. The jurists of that period very
commonly assert that the power of Testation itself is of Natural Law,
that it is a right conferred by the Law of Nature. Their teaching,
though all persons may not at once see the connection, is in substance
followed by those who affirm that the right of dictating or
controlling the posthumous disposal of property is a necessary or
natural consequence of the proprietary rights themselves. And every
student of technical jurisprudence must have come across the same
view, clothed in the language of a rather different school, which, in
its rationale of this department of law, treats succession _ex
testamento_ as the mode of devolution which the property of deceased
persons ought primarily to follow, and then proceeds to account for
succession _ab intestato_ as the incidental provision of the lawgiver
for the discharge of a function which was only left unperformed
through the neglect or misfortune of the deceased proprietor. These
opinions are only expanded forms of the